Although money may be a taboo topic amongst friends, one’s social networks can offer help in times of personal financial straits. This column examines people’s willingness to borrow money from or lend to close friends for everyday purchases and finds that friends are much more willing to lend than to ask to borrow, and that this gap between borrower and lender widens as requests are repeated. Ensuring that there is occasion for reciprocation and using technological tools to regulate the peer-to-peer loan may help improve this suboptimal informal lending market.

A large share of Turkey’s bonds are denominated in foreign currencies, and the Turkish lira has depreciated. This recalls the currency mismatches that contributed to many crises in the 1990s. The column argues that many emerging economies like Turkey's are better able to avoid these crises thanks to improved policies, such as inflation targeting, that have helped foster local currency bond markets. Emerging markets policymakers must not backslide on this progress if they want to maintain financial stability.

Capital flows play a key role in the transmission of real and financial shocks across countries, but empirical work on flows by sector is scarce. This column uses a newly constructed dataset of capital inflows for 85 countries, broken down by borrowing sector, to show that private debt flows are negatively correlated with global risk appetite, while borrowing by sovereigns is positively correlated with risk appetite. This and other results discussed show the importance of splitting capital inflows into their borrowing sectors when designing policy to manage macrofinancial risk.

In the recent crisis in Southern Europe both sovereign governments and private citizens faced increased borrowing costs on their external debt. By contrast, no spillover to private borrowers occurred from the recent US state government debt crisis. This column argues that this different experience stems from much weaker European protections from government interference – the risk that governments will encumber private debt contracts by redenominating the currency of the contract, imposing capital controls, or passing debtor relief legislation.

During the Great Recession, governments famously (and in some cases, infamously) provided banks with lower-cost capital and liquidity so that they would lend, expanding economic activity. This column assesses the efficacy of these policies, estimating marginal propensities to consume and borrow between 2008-2012.

Small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) often report difficulties in obtaining external finance. Based on new research, this column argues that these difficulties are not due to greater financial risks associated with SMEs. Instead, they are the result of imperfections in the market for external finance that negatively affect smaller and younger enterprises. The same research has shown that these types of firms are also the most reliant on external finance to support their investment and growth.